Summoning classes

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I don't remember if anyone has ever collected this information before, so I did a whole bunch of work this morning on how summoning works in BoA. I typed it up just to organize it for myself, and I figured I'd post it in case it's useful to anyone else.

So, for example, if you know Summon Aid at level 2, it will summon monsters of summoning class 3.

The default summoning classes are kind of funky. Assume that monster level is a loose proxy for the power of the monster (which is essentially true). At low levels, increasing your spell level will get you stronger monsters on average but not consistently. For example, if you raise Call Beast from 1 to 2, your average summoned monster goes from level 2.5 to level 3.25, but you have a chance of summoning a Goblin, which is weaker than anything you would've summoned at the lower spell level.

At higher levels, the increase is confusingly not linear but also not anything else. The largest jump is from summoning class 3 to 4,where your average monster goes from level 8.4 to level 16.5, but again the spread is confusingly large; in summoning class 3, the levels are pretty consistently clustered between 6 and 10, but in summoning class 4, they range all the way down from a Imp (L9) to a Drake (L25). Summoning class 6 also has a relatively large spread, from a Unicorn (L22) to an Augmented Giant (L35), although at higher levels the spread is less significant.

But, weirdly, the average level declines from summoning class 6 to 7 (from 27.4 to 24.25). In other words, if you raise Arcane Summon from level 3 to level 4, the monsters that you will summon are weaker on average.

I attached a graph so that you can easily see what I'm talking about.

This also illustrates the vampire summoning problem. Vampires have a summoning class of 5, which means that Arcane Summon L2 summons them. But vampires also have their Mage Spells adjusted to 15, which gives them Arcane Summon, and all spellcasters default to having their spell at level 2. In other words, vampires are summoned with Arcane Summon L2, but they also can cast Arcane Summon L2; vampires can summon vampires that can summon more vampires, and so on. One easy solution is to change their summoning class to 6.